A black circuit board with many colored banana connector plugs in placed on a table. Behind it, two analogue voltage dials stand on either side of an oscilloscope stand. The oscilloscope is a cheap model, with a small LCD display and an exposed red circuit board.

Building An Analogue Computer To Simulate Neurons

March 8, 2026 by No comments

The rapidly-improving speed and versatility of digital computers has mostly driven analogue computers out of use in modern systems, as has the relative difficulty of programming an analogue computer. There is a kind of art, though, in weaving together a series of op-amps to perform mathematical calculations; between this, a historical interest in the machines, and their rarity value, it’s no wonder that new analogue computers are being designed even now, such as [Markus Bindhammer]’s system.

The computer is built around a combined circuit board and patch panel, based on the designs included in three papers in a online library of analogue computer references. The housing around the patch panel took design cues from the Polish AKAT-1 analogue computer, including the two dial voltage indicators and an oscilloscope display, in this case an inexpensive DSO-138. The patch panel uses banana connectors and the jumper wires use stackable connectors, so several wires can be connected to the same socket.

The computer itself has a summing amplifier circuit, a multiplier circuit, an integrator, and square, triangle, and sine wave generators. This simple set of tools is enough to simulate both simple and complex math; for example, [Markus] squared five volts with the multiplier, resulting in 2.5 volts (the multiplier divides the result by ten). A more advanced example is a leaky-integrator model of a neuron, which simulates a differential equation.

We’ve covered a few analogue computers before, as well as a neuron-simulating circuit similar to [Markus]’s demonstration.

Experiment With The Pi Camera The Modular Way

March 8, 2026 by 1 Comment

The various Raspberry Pi camera modules have become the default digital camera hacker’s tool, and have appeared in a huge number of designs over the past decade. They’re versatile and affordable, and while the software can sometimes be a little slow, they’re also of decent enough quality for the investment. Making a Pi camera can be annoying though, because different screens, lenses, and modules have their own mounting requirements. [Jacob David C Cunningham] has a solution here, with a modular Raspberry Pi camera, as an experimentation platform for different screens and lenses.

It takes the form of a central unit that holds the Pi and its support components, and front and rear modules for the screens or displays. Examples are given using the HQ and non-HQ modules, as well as with round or rectangular displays.

When designing a camera for 3D printing it’s a very difficult task, to replicate or exceed the industrial design of commercial cameras. Few succeed, and we’d include ourselves among that number. But this one comes close; it looks like a camera we’d like to use. We like it.

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Hackaday Links: March 8, 2026

March 8, 2026 by 2 Comments

As pointed out by Tom’s Hardware, it’s been 26 years since the introduction of the gigahertz desktop CPU. AMD beat Intel to the punch by dropping the 1 GHz Athlon chip on March 6th of 2000, and partnered with Compaq and Gateway (remember them?) to deliver pre-built machines featuring the speedy silicon just a week later. The archived press release announcing the availability of the chip makes for some interesting reading: AMD compares the accomplishment with Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, and mentions a retail price of $1,299 for the CPU when purchased in 1,000 unit quantities. In response Intel “launched” their 1 GHz Pentium III chip two days later for $990, but supply problems kept it out of customer’s hands for most of the year.

Speaking of breaking a barrier, Mobile World Congress took place this week in Barcelona, where TechCrunch reports there was considerable interest in developing a sub-$50 smartphone. The GSM Association’s Handset Affordability Coalition is working with major telecom carriers in Africa and as of yet unnamed hardware partners to develop the low-cost 4G device with the hopes of bringing an additional 20 million people online. While the goal is worthy enough, industry insiders have pointed out that the skyrocketing cost of memory will make it particularly challenging to meet the group’s aspirational price point.

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How Usable Is Windows 98 In 2026?

March 8, 2026 by 17 Comments

With the RAM and storage crisis hitting personal computing very hard – along with new software increasingly suffering the effects of metastasizing ‘AI’ – more people than ever are pining for the ‘good old days’. For example, using that early 2000s desktop PC with Windows 98 SE might now seem to be a viable alternative in 2026, because it couldn’t possibly make things worse. Or could it? As a reality check, [SteelsOfLiquid] over on YouTube gave this setup a whirl.

The computer of choice is a very common Dell Dimension 2100, featuring a zippy 1.1 GHz Intel Celeron, 256 MB  of DDR1, and a spacious 38 GB HDD. Graphics are provided by the iGPU in the Intel i810 chipset, all in a compact, 6.9 kg light package. As an early Windows XP PC, this gives Windows 98 SE probably a pretty solid shot at keeping up with the times. At least the early 2000s, natch.

Of course, there is a lot of period-correct software you can install, such as Adobe Photoshop 5, MS Office 97 (featuring everyone’s beloved Clippy), but a lot of modern software also runs, with the Retro Systems Revival blog documenting many that still run on Win98SE in some manner, including Audacity 2.0. This makes it totally suitable for basic productivity things.

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Pulse Jet Ski Chases The Winter Blues Away

March 8, 2026 by 4 Comments

A long winter has a way of making a lot of us northerners a little bit squirrly. In [Build N Pulsejets]’s case, squirly enough to mount a home-made propane-powered pulse-jet to a kids’ kick scooter and take to the frozen lake for a rip.

Okay, well, it started as a kid’s scooter, but after trying it on the ice sans pulsejet, [Build N] decided that his cabin fever wasn’t quite bad enough to risk using it in stock configuration. Before mounting the 180 lb thrust (800 N) pulse jet he’d built in a previous video, a few modifications would be needed. Namely, a trio of scrap metal skis and a goodly amount of metalwork to mount them, and the pulse jet. Even on ice, with relatively little friction, the mass of maker and a full propane tank meant the acceleration wasn’t great, but he did get it over 44 mph (77 km/h) on the snowmobile drag strip. (Yeah, snowmobile drag racing’s a thing in the frozen north. Those of you sipping mai tais in the tropics are probably pretty jealous right now, huh?)

These pages have been no stranger to pulse jets, given that they’re probably the easiest engine to build at home. We’ve seen them mounted on everything from go karts, to Swedish snomobiles, and even tea kettles.  Actually, we’ve seen two of those. No points for guessing what nation the tea kettle builds hail from.

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Restoring A Commodore PET 3032 In Rough Condition

March 8, 2026 by 8 Comments

The restored PET/CBM 3032. (Credit: Drygol, retrohax.net)
The restored PET/CBM 3032. (Credit: Drygol, retrohax.net)

The Commodore CBM 3032 is a successor to the original Commodore PET 2001, yet due a conflicting trademark issue with Philips these first European PETs were called ‘CBM’ instead. Hence the labeling on the CBM 3032 that [Drygol] had in for a restoration, which would have been produced somewhere between 1979 and the cessation of its manufacturing a few years later. This former machine of the University of Szcezecin in Poland had languished in a basement until a local demoscene group came across it and wanted to use it, after a restoration.

Although at first glance from just the front it didn’t look too shabby, problems were apparent from just a walkaround, including rusty and buckled paneling, showing that the time spent in storage had not done it any favors. Internally there was decades worth of dust, along with a dodgy potentiometer, cold joints and some PCB-level bodges that may or may not have been there from the factory.

The main case was disassembled by drilling out the rivets to gain full access to every nook and cranny, allowing for a good cleaning and repainting prior to putting in fresh rivets. On the PCB side of things, a potentiometer and an LM340KC-12 linear regulator in a TO-3 package had to be replaced, after which the system managed to boot reliably once in every three attempts.

Fixing this took basically cleaning all contacts and IC sockets, as well as refurbishing the keyboard, with corrosion and the occasional broken trace causing a lot of grief. Ultimately the system was restored and ready to be put into demoscene service.

 

A circuit board card is shown, with a blue panel on one side. On the panel are switches and an RS-232 port.

Spoofing An Emergency Traffic Preemption Signal

March 8, 2026 by 27 Comments

There’s a well-known movie trope in which a hacker takes control of the traffic lights in a city, causing general mayhem or creating a clear getaway path. Unlike many Hollywood representations of hacking, this is actually possible in principle; many cities install Emergency Vehicle Preemption (EVP) systems in their traffic signals to turn them green when an emergency vehicle is approaching. To see what it would actually take to control one of these, [xssfox] reverse-engineered a Strobecom II EVP system.

Most EVP systems, particularly older ones, use a strobing infrared light to alert a traffic signal to an approaching emergency vehicle. To avoid misuse, vehicles often encode a vehicle ID in the infrared signal. There have been some claims that a Flipper Zero can trigger these systems, but none that were well-verified, and probably with good reason; anyone actually trying this against a live system is courting serious legal trouble. To see whether this was actually possible [xssfox] obtained real hardware and tried to reverse-engineer the infrared protocol.

There are two main manufacturers for optical EVP systems: GTT Opticom and Tomar Strobecom. [xssfox] managed to buy a Tomar power supply which handled the processing for signal transmission, and which worked with Opticom systems. Looking at the output of this revealed that it encoded data by skipping pulses, which should be simple enough for Flipper Zero to replicate.

To reverse-engineer the Strobecom protocol, [xssfox] managed to buy a Strobecom optical signal processor, which would normally detect an emergency signal. This worked by modulating the length of infrared pulses. After some brute-forcing, a transmitter using an Arduino Nano and an infrared LED managed to activate the preemption signal, and even to transmit a vehicle ID. It seems that Strobecom systems, at least, are fairly demanding in terms of the signals they accept; signals had to be precisely timed, and in at least some systems, a valid vehicle ID would be needed to change the light.

If you’d like to learn more, we’ve gone into the technology of North American traffic signals before.